For eight centuries, the objects that touched the life of Francis of Assisi have stayed close to home, guarded in the hilltop Umbrian town where he was born, preached, and died. This fall, a collection of them crosses an ocean for the first time. Beginning Friday, October 16, the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco will host an exhibition of relics and treasures tied to St. Francis and his contemporary St. Clare of Assisi, running through November 28. Admission is free, and no reservation is required.
The timing is deliberate on two counts. The exhibition marks the 800th anniversary of St. Francis's death, in 1226, and the 250th anniversary of the city that bears his name. San Francisco was founded in 1776 as Mission San Francisco de Asís, named for the friar, and the cathedral's own materials describe the city as having been named for and entrusted to his care. The showing also falls inside a Year of St. Francis proclaimed by Pope Leo XIV, running from January 10, 2026, through January 10, 2027.
The objects on view are the draw. Among them is a relic containing blood associated with St. Francis's stigmata, the wounds tradition holds he received on Mount La Verna in Tuscany in 1224, making him the first widely recorded stigmatic in Christian history. Also displayed are his breviary and his habit, the horn of the Sultan, and locks of St. Clare's hair. Perhaps the most historically significant piece is the coperchio di Cimabue, a wooden cover that once protected the body of St. Francis, shown alongside a historic portrait of the saint attributed to the medieval painter Cimabue.
Cimabue, born Giovanni Cenni di Pepo around 1240 in Florence and dead by 1302, is often described as one of the first Italian painters to break from the stiff Italo-Byzantine style that dominated medieval art, giving his figures more lifelike proportions and a subtler use of shading. He is traditionally named as the teacher of Giotto. A portrait of Francis attributed to him, dated in one exhibition listing to 1290, would place the image within living memory of the saint's death. The oldest surviving depiction of Francis is a fresco at the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco, painted between 1228 and 1229, but that is a religious image rather than a portrait; an attributed Cimabue carries a different kind of weight.
The exhibition also reaches across the Atlantic in the other direction. Organizers have included replicas of all 21 California missions, tying the display to the state's own Franciscan history. The missions were founded under the Franciscan order, and the chain of them, stretching from San Diego to Sonoma, remains one of the most visible legacies of the friars in the American West.
Bringing the objects to San Francisco was the work of the Knights of St. Francis and the Archdiocese of San Francisco, according to the organizers. The cathedral, at 1111 Gough Street, keeps visitor hours of 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., with a pause during weekday Mass from noon to 1 p.m. A special opening celebration was held Wednesday evening at 6:30 p.m., after which the doors remain open to visitors through late November.
The San Francisco display follows a far larger event in Assisi earlier this year. From February 22 through March 22, the mortal remains of St. Francis were publicly displayed in the Basilica of Saint Francis for an extended monthlong period, the first time in eight centuries the remains had been exposed for prolonged public veneration. Roughly 370,000 people from five continents registered to venerate the relics during that display, and visitors had to book free online reservations in advance. Assisi's mayor, Valter Stoppini, estimated the final count could reach half a million, with 400 volunteers recruited to move pilgrims through the town's cobblestone streets and into the lower basilica, where the bones rested in a bulletproof glass box. The monthlong crush strained the medieval city's narrow, souvenir-lined streets and its limited services, a mixed blessing for residents and merchants alike.
No such reservation system has been described for San Francisco. The exhibition is billed as free and open to the public during the cathedral's posted hours, which removes the capacity barrier that shaped the Assisi veneration. For a city whose name and identity trace directly back to a 13th-century friar, the arrival of objects that have never left Assisi offers a rare, close-up link to that history without crossing an ocean to see it.
The cathedral itself is a modern landmark, completed in 1971 and designed by Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi in a structural expressionist style, with a soaring saddle-shaped roof that seats 2,400. It is the third cathedral to serve the archdiocese, which was founded in 1891. Housing relics that predate it by roughly seven centuries, the building becomes, for six weeks, the westernmost outpost of a devotion that began in a small Italian town and gave this city its name.